Tayari Jones

Bestselling Author of An American Marriage

Tayari Jones’s AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE has been named a 2018 Oprah’s Book Club Selection, and is a New York Times (#2), Indie Bound, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller with 250,000 copies in print, all within two weeks of its release. This story of a marriage torn apart by a wrongful conviction has been called “haunting . . . beautifully written” (The New York Times Book Review) and “brilliant and heartbreaking . . . unforgettable” (USA Today).

“It’s among Tayari’s many gifts that she can touch us soul to soul with her words,” says Oprah Winfrey. The novel has been called “exquisite, timely and powerful” (Edwidge Danticat), and Jones has been praised for her “compassionate observation, her clear-eyed insight and her beautifully written and complex characters” (Amy Bloom) and “heartbreaking and genuinely suspenseful love story” (Tom Perrotta). Michael Chabon says that Jones’s “vision . . . strength, and . . . truth-telling voice have found a new level of artistry and power.”

Jones was born and raised in Atlanta, and much of her writing centers on the urban South. “Although I now live in the Northeast,” she explains, “my imagination lives in Atlanta.” Her previous novel, SILVER SPARROW, a story of a man’s deception, a family’s complicity, and the two teenage girls caught in the middle, was chosen for the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read Library. Her first novel, LEAVING ATLANTA, a coming-of-age story set against the city’s infamous African American child murders of 1979–81, won the Hurston/Wright Award for debut fiction. Her second novel, THE UNTELLING, about a family struggling to overcome the aftermath of a fatal car accident, received the Lillian Smith Book Award from the Southern Regional Council and the University of Georgia Libraries. The Village Voice wrote, “Tayari Jones is fast defining black middle-class Atlanta the way that Cheever did for Westchester.”

Jones currently serves on the MFA faculty of Rutgers University–Newark. She is spending the 2017–18 academic year as the Shearing Fellow for Distinguished Writers at the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is a graduate of Spelman College (BA), the University of Iowa (MA), and Arizona State University (MFA). While at Spelman, she met the then-president, Johnnetta Cole, who had heard that Jones was a writer and asked her, “How’s the writing?” “It was like someone had touched me with a magic wand, and I started taking my writing more seriously,” Jones says. She spent the 2011–12 academic year as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard. An accomplished and witty speaker, she has spoken at hundreds of colleges and universities, libraries, writers’ conferences, and literary series all over the country.

Meet Tayari Jones

Travels from

Brooklyn, New York

Quotes

Thank you so much for engaging with our community with so much insight and passion. Your lecture was so inspiring, and it was a real joy to spend time with you. You made a huge impact on everyone you connected with here in Portland: the high school students you met with, the local writers you spoke with, and our 2,000-person audience in the concert hall. We can’t say it enough: Thank you!

Tayari Jones's visit to Wesleyan College was a smashing success. She was thoughtful and thought-provoking, warm, funny, and incredibly generous to our students...and brought passion and commitment to each of her events. Our students simply loved her. The session with our first-year students was the best of all. I'll definitely recommend Silver Sparrow to colleagues teaching first-year seminars.

Tayari Jones was one of the most memorable speakers to headline a James River Writers Conference. She's personable, insightful, and passionate about encouraging writers to trust their work and their voices. She provided many wise words about the craft and business of writing to conference attendees. Even months afterward, folks here still discuss Tayari's visit and note that her panels were among the most valuable at the conference.